jeffrey eugenides the marriage plot review

When he does, he’s pumped full of lithium, fat, impotent, able to function, but desperately self-loathing and unhappy. He’s lonely, depressed, unshaven (the hospital doesn’t let its patients have razors) and just wants to leave. He’s committed to a rundown, state-run facility, where barely interested doctors periodically check in and adjust his medication. While all the characters in the novel are flawlessly drawn, the most affecting part of the book is when Eugenides follows Leonard, deeply in love with Madeleine but beaten down by his own demons, to a mental hospital. The genius of The Marriage Plot comes from the fact that Eugenides realizes that the pain and the joy of love are inseparable, and that nothing is ever as easy or as complicated as we think-or wish-it would be. In literature, even the most flawed and beaten down and hurt people-the “beautiful losers,” as Leonard Cohen described them-can be sanctified even the most doomed love affair can be holy.

But the world isn’t perfect, and never has been, and never will be.īooks are different. In a perfect world, our families would teach us about love, would show us what love is. For many of us-and if you’re reading this, chances are you’ll identify-those are more or less the same thing. This is a book about books, and it’s a book about falling in love. They all have goals, and they’re all met with both success and failure along the way. And then there’s Mitchell Grammaticus, who loves Madeleine and resents Leonard, who goes to Europe and then India to try to find God and forget his crush. Madeleine falls in love with Leonard Bankhead, a former Portland pothead struggling to control his bipolar disorder. Those are never easy questions, and they’re especially difficult for these three kids, all well-meaning and all imperfect. The Marriage Plot follows Madeleine and two of her schoolmates as they try to figure out who they are and what they want.

Is it the Victorian literature she’s loved for years, the novels that maybe remind her, somehow, of her financially comfortable, WASP upbringing? Or is it the brainy, cold, post-structuralist meta-analysis of Roland Barthes, the darling of the cool post-punk kids on her campus? It’s the early 1980s in Providence, R.I., and Madeleine is trying to figure out who she is, what stories speak to her.

He goes on to list the novels and volumes of poetry-Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Denise Levertov-that sit on the shelves of a recent college graduate named Madeleine Hanna. “To start with, look at all the books.” That’s how Jeffrey Eugenides begins The Marriage Plot, his third-and greatest-novel to date.

Jeffrey eugenides the marriage plot review